Thursday, December 29, 2011

How Flustered Was I?

wherein I and my fellow students of Arabic at the Unity Center Mosque go to dinner, then go to Shatila bakery for desert, and then discover a Tunisian lady in some distress, and my teacher drove her home.

It was dark, and the neighborhood where the lady lived had a lot of uncut grass and dogs barking. My teacher went up on the front porch with the lady, and I was just behind them on the sidewalk. My teacher rang the door bell and the owner of the house, where the lady rented the basement, came to the door.
He was not wearing a shirt, which surprised me, not so much because he was shirtless and it was a hot summer's night, but because my teacher was a good Muslim lady herself, and this was probably a bit infra dig.
I remember distinctly saying to myself: "I hope he's at least wearing trousers!"
That's what I said to myself: trousers, not pants!

That's how flustered I was: I was so flustered that I thought I was a Brit, and not just any Brit, but a chappie into intrigues about trousers during Eights Week at Oxford. The barking dogs and the immodesty scared the Evelyn Waugh out of me!

(Now the only thing I have to worry about is whether Lowe's will pull their commercial support.)
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